I suspect I am somewhat naive about the reality of a contest,

Uhhh, yeah. Think about the majority of people who enter these contests... these are not computer geeks. These are people whose idea of a good time is to put a dozen 15" subwoofers in the trunk of their car and scare the neighbors. At a typical IASCA contest, there are no computers. Period. Not with the contestants, not with the judges. These contests are music contests designed to see whose CD player can (A) play the best reproduction of the music, and (B) play the loudest. The judges are trained to operate just about any weird CD player on the planet, and to have really good ears and to know just what a particular track is supposed to sound like. But that is the limit and extent of their knowledge! They will not be even the least bit interested in in process that requires them to lug around a piece of equipment (i.e. laptop computer) and IASCA is certainly not going to change the way they do things just so the half dozen lunatics in the whole world such as myself can enter their contests with something that is not a CD player.

The only hope would be a completely non-intrusive, no-additional-workload solution, such as the empeg being able to display undisputable verification that the file currently playing has not been tampered with, but is in fact byte for byte identical to the file provided by IASCA. Apparently a simple checksum or hash is not sufficient to this purpose. I don't understand how these things work, but several people on this bbs who are a lot smarter than me (yeah, I mean you, Frank!) are saying that this is not a trivial undertaking.

When digital music players become mainstream, rather than the 1/100 of 1% of market share currently commanded by empeg, then IASCA will have to address the situation.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"